There are more things
in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Shakespeare,
Hamlet

Scientific
materialism is a strange philosophy for everyone to be attached
to . . . Why should it be the preferred
philosophy? Of all the philosophies, it’s the one that allows
the least hope relative to any matter whatsoever! If it were so
— well, that’s that, that’s the way it is. But why should onehope that it is the one that turns out to be so?
Why should one so much want it to be so that one is moved to presently
affirm that it’s already so,
even though you haven’t really found out that it’s so yet? . .
. Rather than just willing to have it be that way or whatever
way it is, but here just to find out the way it really is, and
not anything other than that.

The overwhelmingly
predominant view these days — the one with the political and cultural
clout as well as the philosophical influence — is that of scientific
materialism. We cannot even begin to talk about alternative
views that do include a Greater Reality, without acknowledging the power
and influence held by the view that openly denies or strongly doubts that
any non-material reality exists.

Simple
materialism: the naive realism of sense and "common sense"— The simplest
form of materialism says reality is exclusively that which appears
to the five material senses. The basic methodology by which materialism
justifies itself is that of naive realism:
“what you see [or hear, or smell, or taste, or touch] is what you
get [or all that is real].”

Scientific
materialism: amplifying sense and common sense through technology
— Scientific materialism augments materialism in a specific way: reality
also includes whatever is directly perceivable via (or directly inferable
from) scientific instrumentation used in carefully controlled experiments.
Thus even though the immediate senses cannot detect radioactivity, scientific
instrumentation can, and thus radioactivity is also considered “real”
by scientific materialists.

Human
potential within the materialistic view
— Within the view of materialism, our most obvious human potential is
to be as self-fulfilled as possible (via the available materialistic
means) while we are still alive. Fulfillment is in human (not Spiritual)
terms: bodily pleasure and emotional contentment. Because nothing significant
can be said about what happens after one dies within this viewpoint,
no consideration is given to what consequence living solely to fulfill
oneself has on one’s destiny after death. There is no absolute address
to the problem of human suffering ot unhappiness; but it is presumed
that increasingly greater understanding of (and control over) material
reality corresponds to a lessening of human suffering (at least to the
degree that that suffering takes a material form).

Limitations
of the materialistic view
— In some sense, the primary limitation of materialism is its “obviousness”.
We rely on our senses all the time, to the point where we place a great
deal of trust in those senses. And rightly so, relative to ordinary
functioning and survival: our senses are constantly keeping us alive,
whether we are speeding down the road in our automobiles and suddenly
swerve out of the way of an unexpected car; or we are spitting out something
that tastes “off”. Why would we want to bad-mouth such good friends
as these five? We are so intimate with (and habituated to) these friends
that there is even an emotional overtone of “obviousness” to everything
they “tell” us. It’s worth recalling how the "apparently obvious" has
been shown to be untrue — the stuff of mere appearance — time and time
again.

That
which materialism does not account for is the clue to what will supercede
it—
Because paradigm shifts are presaged by that which the current paradigm
cannot account for, it is worth taking a close look at those aspects
of our experience that mainstream scientific materialism has not adequately
accounted for. These include two fundamental facts of our existence:
the nature of human consciousness; and the nature of human death (and
human suffering).

The
machine is in the Ghost: materialism does not account for consciousness
— The phrase, “ghost in the machine”, is used to refer to all those
aspects of human beings that — to date — have not been accounted for
mechanistically (otherwise they’d be a part of the machine). So this
would include a “spirit” or “soul”, and of course, “consciousness”.
There is a view — an esoteric Spiritual (and Transcendental) view —
that does account for the “one / many” dichotomy and the “ghost in the
machine”: the view that our apparently separate “consciousness” (along
with our body-minds, and the material and Spiritual dimensions altogether)
is arising in the One Divine Consciousness, and the sense of being “one
being” (despite being associated with a “body-mind” machine having countless
parts and personalities: a veritable “society”) is a direct consequence
of the One Being being the inherent True Self of all. The ghost is not
in the machine. The machine is in the Ghost!

Materialism
does not account for death and suffering
— The inability for materialism to adequately account for this aspect
of oneself called “consciousness” is the reason why death too has been
inadequately accounted for. Materialism suggests that death is simply
when the battery dies and the “body-mind” machine (thereby) comes to
a halt. But if there is a residual part to a human being beyond the
part that has died (the physical body), then understanding its destiny
is of paramount, personal importance to each of us. Therefore, the inability
for materialism to account for human consciousness raises a big question
mark in the context of our own mortality. If one has any intelligence
one can’t say, “I can’t account for consciousness in material terms”,
and simultaneously say, “Who cares about what happens after we die?
Let’s just eat, drink, and be merry in the meanwhile!” As a result of
our culture's technological frenzy, and as a result of our mistaking
self-fulfillment for happiness, we are a culture that is increasingly
pleasured in body and stimulated in mind, but increasingly desperate
at heart.

True
freedom of inquiry vs. the politically enforced reductionism of scientific
materialism—
The philosophy of scientific materialism also haspoliticalforce in the sense
that it tends to enforce itself as the only acceptable view on reality.
Should you or I actually claim that we have seen God, or that we have
come into contact with a Greater Reality, we are likely to be subjected
to ridicule — either covert or overt; in our contemporary, scientifically
materialistic, Western civilization, all such experiences have tended
to be immediately interpreted as hallucinatory by-products of the material
brain, rather than evidence of a Greater Reality. But now science itself
is developing to the point where it cannot use that dismissive argument
any more: neurophysiology knows too much about how hallucinations, delusions,
etc. are produced, and can no longer claim that spiritual experiences
are hallucinations or delusions, when neurophysiological studies of
the human brain during such experiences indicate otherwise.